Recently I decided to upgrade from an ancient gtx 1070 to an rx 7700 xt.

At first I was very excited about the upgrade... However I experienced something that is becoming a huge turn off for me. The drivers seem to just... Suck... To the point where I'm considering returning the gpu and going back to an nvidea gpu. And I don't want to be the guy to be a gpu brand shill.

I had done my research, I did hear the drivers used to suck. And people claimed it no longer sucked. Just within a day of having my new card I feel like I was lied to.

Granted yes, the hardware itself is amazing and I definitely experienced huge improvements already. But having to juggle around an older driver so I can have a stable encoder to stream VR games to my quest (which now that I'm thinking of, if the encoder crashes so easily then OBS must experience issues to), but then need to upgrade my driver version cause otherwise my switch emulator times out the driver and causes it to crash the PC, and even when upgrading the driver again I expirience artifacts in emulation (ok granted it's EMULATION so I can't really blame amd on that one). I feel like I made the wrong decision and I'm not excited to see what bugs feature drivers may come with.

Anyway malding post is over. I wanted to make a discussion on this thread to ask about your experience with AMD. Maybe I am overthinking this. Or maybe this is a more widespread issue that needs to be talked about more still.

My current specs are Ryzen 7 5800x 32gb ram Gtx 1070

I have been meaning for a while to get a new gpu. But all the choices are overwhelming me.

I'm not looking into changing cpu any time soon so hopefully the choice will not be bottlenecking me

The budget I have is around 500$. Don't play anything too intense, so don't really need anything too fancy. The heaviest games I play are mostly VR.

Quick edit: List both an AMD and Nvidia option if possible. There's a non zero chance of me switching to Linux and want to make a more informed choice.